Red Hat OpenShift upgrade reaffirms commitment to PaaS

Red Hat has released the second version of its OpenShift Enterprise platform as a service (PaaS), which comes with tools that make it easier to deploy, and provide integration with more hardware options and programming languages. It also is the latest move in the busy PaaS market, which is quickly gaining steam to catch up in importance to the more established IaaS and SaaS markets.

Red Hat says that OpenShift is a "critical component" of its open hybrid cloud vision and it specifically addresses application developer needs. OpenShift provides "an on-demand, elastic, scalable and fully configured application development, testing and hosting environment for application developers so they can focus on coding new application services with reduced operational burdens," a Red Hat press release states. OpenShift is made of various other Red Hat components including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss application platform and OpenShift Origin, which is the open source project that feeds the OpenShift platform.

OpenShift Enterprise was first announced in November as OpenShift Online, the hosted public cloud version of the platform. Today, Red Hat made OpenShift Enterprise 2 available, which is the private cloud, on-premises version of the platform.

New features in the OpenShift Enterprise release today include easier deployment with a new installer, and more plug-in based integration with load balancers and routers. There are additional integrations with OpenStack IaaS components too, such as the heat project. Red Hat is the top code-contributing company to OpenStack, the open source IaaS platform.

The latest OpenShift Enterprise version also comes with a new administrative console and support for additional programming languages Node.js and server-side JavaScript. That adds to previously supported languages Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl.

OpenShift Online, the hosted version, costs between $0.02 per hour to $0.10 per hour, based on how large of a disk size is used.

The PaaS market has been heating up recently and Red Hat's release of the latest version of its PaaS marks the latest move. Pivotal (which is a spin out from VMware and EMC) recently released its PaaS named CF, which is the productized version of the Cloud Foundry open source project. Meanwhile, Verizon recently announced it would be embracing the Cloud Foundry PaaS and Rackspace announced a new PaaS project named Solum. This all comes as IDC predicts that the PaaS market will grow to $14 billion by 2017.

Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.

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